When right-wing provocateur and podcaster Dan Bongino became the FBI’s deputy director in March, conservative activists had every reason to be delighted. He had, after all, spent years telling them what they wanted to hear, including a boast in which Bongino declared, “My entire life right now is about owning the libs. That’s it. The libs, because they have shown themselves … to be pure, unadulterated evil.”

The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg added in a recent column, “When a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts last year, the conservative podcaster Dan Bongino made a veiled threat on social media. ‘The irony about this for the scumbag commie libs, is that the cold civil war they’re pushing for will end really badly for them,’ he wrote. Liberals, said Bongino, had been playing at revolution, and would now get a taste of the real thing. ‘They’re not ready for what comes next.’”

But his honeymoon period with the Republican base was short-lived: After Bongino appeared on Fox Business and dismissed conspiracy theories about the death of Jeffrey Epstein, some far-right conspiracy theorists who’d seen the FBI deputy director as a political ally turned on him.

In theory, Bongino could’ve shrugged off the criticisms from the fringe and focused on his weighty professional responsibilities at the bureau. In practice, however, he appears to be taking steps designed to make the right happy. NBC News reported:

Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino said Monday that his agency will revive or devote more resources into several investigations of unsolved cases from the Biden administration that have ‘garnered public interest’ and have long ignited claims of corruption by allies and supporters of President Donald Trump.

As part of Bongino’s announcement, the bureau will apparently reassess three specific cases:

• The investigation into the pipe bombs that were found near the Democratic Party and the Republican Party headquarters Jan. 6, 2021;
• The investigation into a bag of cocaine found at the White House in 2023;
• The investigation into the 2022 leak of the unpublished Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade.

This doesn’t appear to be a situation in which investigators uncovered new evidence that generated a fresh round of attention. Rather, Bongino decided to “either re-open, or push additional resources and investigative attention, to these cases” due to “public interest.”

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That, of course, seems like a curious way of saying, “The earlier investigations didn’t turn up anything, but some people still occasionally still talk about these cases, so we’re giving it another try.”

For what it’s worth, there are some broader concerns about the integrity of these upcoming re-evaluations. Indeed, Bongino is on record peddling conspiracy theories about the very cases he’s now examining: As the NBC News report noted, it was earlier this year when Bongino accused the FBI of lying about not knowing the identity of the pipe bomber, saying the agency “just doesn’t want to tell us because it was an inside job.”

As for the White House case, Bongino is on record claiming, “[T]here’s absolutely ZERO chance anyone other than a family member brought that cocaine inside the White House complex.”

There is no publicly available information to support either of these assertions, though FBI personnel will apparently go look for some.